30 June 2014

This 22-minute video takes the viewer for a ride down Norway's Fjaerland Fjord (which branches off at Balestrand from the larger and better-known Sognefjord). The trip begins at the head (north end) of the fjord, proceeds for about 6 minutes south to the area of the Fjaerland "booktown," then turns back north, ending at one of the tunnels that opened this fjord to the vehicular traffic of the world.

The video holds special interest for me because one quarter of my genes (the Distad family ones, from the hamlet of Distad) emigrated from this valley to settle in Minnesota. I visited this area in the 1980s, when the only access was by ferry, and met family members who gave me a copy of a family tree tracing various Olsons and Torsons and Ivarsdatters and Andresons and Distads back to the 1600s.

Posted mostly for my family. Casual readers will not want to view the entire video, but it's worth sampling the first 4-5 minutes just to get a sense of the majesty of a real fjord. Americans will notice a) the absence of advertising billboards, and b) that some people actually walk.

If you do watch, absolutely click on the full-screen icon in the lower right corner. That's what it's for.

An op-ed piece in Salon remembers and bemoans the death of the middle class:

In our neighbors’ driveways, in their living rooms, in their
backyards, I saw the evidence of prosperity distributed equally among
the social classes: speedboats, Corvette Stingrays, waterbeds,
snowmobiles, motorcycles, hunting rifles, RVs, CB radios. I’ve always
believed that the ’70s are remembered as the Decade That Taste Forgot
because they were a time when people without culture or education had
the money to not only indulge their passions, but flaunt them in front
of the entire nation. It was an era, to use the title of a 1975
sociological study of a Wisconsin tavern, of blue-collar aristocrats. That all began to change in the 1980s...

Once again this spring a wall of ice moved off some northern Minnesota lakes, damaging homes of those who built them too close to the shoreline. There are reasons why some local building codes incorporate setbacks from shoreline, and not just for riparian environmental preservation.

The Monarch in the top photo is the first one we have had this year raised from an egg laid on milkweed in our garden. She eclosed about 0730 this morning and will fly away before noon.The title quote is the last sentence of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - one of her classic novels, but one that should NOT be the first Christie you read. Get experience reading a dozen or two other ones first; save this one for later.

27 June 2014

Since the middle-ages, legend has spread of a fearful beast once said to stalk [Suffolk's] coastline and countryside.

Despite
tales of a fiery-eyed monster showing up in graveyards, forests and
roadsides - and an account of claw marks surfacing on the door to
Blythburgh Church - the giant dog’s existence has been reserved to the
annals of folklore.

Until now, perhaps, as archeologists have
revealed evidence of huge skeletal remains unearthed by a member of the
public in the trenches at Leiston Abbey last year...

“It was quite a surprise. We’re all dog lovers and we have a site dog with us on our digs, so it was quite poignant. “Even back then, pets were held in high regard.”

Here's more info on the legendary "Black Shuck":

Black Shuck,
Old Shuck, Old Shock or Shuck is the name given to a medieval hellhound
in England. This devil dog was said to have black fur, flaming eyes,
sharp teeth and claws, and great strength. Locals described sightings of
Black Shuck in graveyards, forests, and roadsides. Shuck’s most famous
attack happened on August 4th, 1577 at two churches in Blythburgh
and
Bungay in the English countryside, about seven miles from Leiston Abbey.

During a storm on August 4th 1577, Black Shuck reportedly broke
through the doors of Holy Trinity Church in Blythburgh and charged
through a large congregation. It was during this attack that he
allegedly killed a man and a boy, right before the church steeple
collapsed through the roof. It was during this attack that Black Shuck
left claw marks on the north door of Holy Trinity Church that are still
visible today...

All too often during matches, seemingly fit men fall to the ground in agony. They scream, wince, pound the grass with their fists and gesture to the sidelines for a stretcher. Some of them clutch a limb as if it was just freed from the jaws of a wood chipper.
But after a few moments, just as the priests arrive to administer last rites, they sit up on the gurney, shake it off, rise to their feet and run back on the field to play some more.

Fans of the world's most popular game know that this is just one of soccer's oldest and most universally despised tactics. Turning a small foul into a death performance worthy of La Scala can draw cards for opposing players, kill time from the clock or just give one's winded teammates a breather...

The study showed one thing emphatically: The amount of histrionics your players display during a match correlates strongly to what the scoreboard says. Players on teams that were losing their games accounted for 40 "injuries" and nearly 12.5 minutes of writhing time. But players on teams that were winning—the ones who have the most incentive to run out the clock—accounted for 103 "injuries" and almost four times as much writhing.

26 June 2014

"Taken during "The Mayana Soora Thiruvizha" festival takes place every
March in the small village of Kaveripattinam, the day after
Mahashivarathiri (The great night of Shiva). The festival is devoted to
Angalamman, a fierce guardian deity worshipped widely in Southern India."

Though British counterintelligence spent a considerable amount of time trying to detect enemy secret ink, MI6, British foreign intelligence, experimented with its own recipes... Officers were especially interested in experimenting with bodiily fluids like blood, saliva, urine, and semen - all readily available substances. An advantage of using bodily fluids is that possession of these substances is not proof of guilt... [spies had been convicted and executed based on the discovery of lemon residue on writing instruments].

Mansfield Cumming, head of MI6... thought "the best invisible ink is semen." MI6 investigators thought they had solved a great problem, and the men started gleefully experimenting with the new discovery. Obviously, the main way to produce semen at the office was through masturbation. The agent who had discovered the covert use of semen reportedly had to transfer to another department after he was teased so much by other staff members. One officer in Copnhagen took the new discovery so seriously that he "stocked it in a bottle - for his letters stank to high heaven and we had to tell him that a fresh operation was necessary for each letter." (p. 151)

Found in Prisoners, Lovers, & Spies; The Story of Invisible Ink from Herodotus to al-Qaeda, by Kristie Macrakis.

"If the current president can selectively
enforce, change or create laws as he chooses with impunity, without the
involvement of the Legislative Branch, his successors will be able to
do the same," Boehner wrote in the memo. "This shifts the balance of
power decisively and dangerously in favor of the presidency, giving the
president king-like authority at the expense of the American people and
their elected legislators."

While awaiting details of which orders will be challenged, I thought it would be good to post the Wikipedia page detailing all of the executive orders by the current and all the past presidents. At the page you can scroll down to access the content of each order by each president.

Summer is the time for travel, and thus the opportunity for me and the readers of this blog to visit CCC-constructed stonework projects around the country. These photos come to us courtesy of reader Christopher, who recently traveled to Albuquerque, and found this stone structure at an altitude of 10,000+ feet along the Sandia Crest Road.

A plaque embedded in the stone confirms the provenance of the structure. It is classic CCC work in that it makes use exclusively of local stone. The style obviously does not involve tight junctions, and the overall appearance of a partially-collapsed "ruin" is clearly an artistic endeavor. I found this explanation online:

To clean a year's worth of graffiti off the
Kiwanis Cabin at Sandia Crest, it takes three archaeologists, a truck
with a pressure washer, someone to drive the truck and someone to use
the washer in a way that doesn't damage the cabin... The cabin had windows on three sides, a
fireplace and a door, but the fireplace was sealed and the windows and
door were removed. "Beginning in the '40s the windows started being broken," Hudson said.

So sad to hear about the graffiti and vandalism performed by mindless cretins.

In the span of eight years, from 1933 to 1941, 54,585 Civilian
Conservation Corps enrollees in New Mexico built hundreds of roads and
rails, 795 bridges, 472 lookout towers large dams and reservoirs,
installed millions of rods of fences and planted millions of trees for
reforestation and to prevent gully erosion. When these New Mexico men
joined the corps, along with 3.5 million other Americans, the country
was in desperate straits. Close to 25 percent of the population was
unemployed. Hunger and despair had become a way of life. A group of local
corps alumni want to see a memorial CCC museum of national stature
built on the site where CCC Camp 814 F-8-N Sandia Park once stood on a
piece of land just off NM 536, the Sandia Crest Road. They want people
to know what they accomplished in youthful days during the Great
Depression. And they want today’s youth to know that youth are a major
asset to this country, just as the CCC men were when they were boys. The
CCC was the greatest-ever conservation effort in American history.

I have a variety of pleasant memories of the Sandias, dating from the
time I lived in Dallas and visited family in Grants and friends in
Albuquerque. But despite hiking and playing frisbee in the mountains, I
don't remember ever having encountered this cabin.

Again, a hat tip to reader Christopher for sending me the photos; if readers in the Albuquerque region have photos of other stonework along the Sandia Crest Trail (bridges, stairways), please feel free to send them along.

24 June 2014

Details from the Bellingham Herald (but it's better to listen to the girl tell the story):

A teenage babysitter and two young men were arrested
Wednesday, June 18, when the babysitter made up a story about two armed,
black men breaking into an apartment east of Ferndale to throw deputies
off the track of the real thieves, according to the Whatcom County
Sheriff's Office.

The 17-year-old girl had been watching three
kids from 1 to 4 years old at the apartment in the 5400 block of
Northwest Drive. She reported two black men in their 20s or 30s - one
with a gun, one with a knife - had barged in through a back door around
4:20 p.m. and told her she should leave if she didn't want to get hurt.
None of the children were hurt as they fled from the apartment with her.

A SWAT team, a U.S. border helicopter and dozens of law enforcement
personnel - many of them on call, working overtime - responded to the
scene looking for two armed men with backpacks...

Cody Oakes, 25, an operations manager for J.P. Morgan, had been
ready to walk out the door with a duffel bag in his hand to go to
football practice. (He plays quarterback and wide receiver for the
Bellingham Bulldogs, a semi-pro team.) He'd noticed heavily armed police
in camouflage marching down the road.

One of his roommates got
in touch with a detective and found out what was going on. Through her,
deputies ordered Oakes to come outside. He did, once the detective
agreed to come in and escort him out. A sniper stood about 25 yards away
with his sight fixed on Oakes. Deputies handcuffed him, pulled his
shirt over his head, and sat him in the back of a patrol car...

Eventually, the teen admitted she'd made up the story about an
armed home invasion to cover for how she'd let her 16-year-old boyfriend
and a young man, Ruben Jerome Benjamin, 18, into the apartment to steal
electronics, said Sheriff Bill Elfo.

The burglars briefly got
away with a gaming system, laptops and a piggy bank, stuffing a total of
$1,500 in stolen goods in their backpacks.

The news report that a little girl whose face was scarred by pit bulls was asked to leave a KFC establishment because her disfigurement was disturbing the customers... is a HOAX. A fundraising hoax.

They originally said the child and her grandmother were asked to
leave a KFC that turned out to have been closed for years. Victoria’s
aunt Teri Rials Bates, who maintains the page, later said it happened at
another location on Woodrow Wilson Drive near the Jackson hospital
where Victoria went for treatment.

Security camera footage from
that KFC and another near the hospital does not show children matching
Victoria’s description going into either restaurant on May 15, according
to sources interviewed by the Leader-Call. Nor did any orders taken
that day include both sweet tea and mashed potatoes – what Mullins
claimed she ordered for her granddaughter...

People touched by Victoria’s story have reportedly sent in more than $135,000 in donations as surgeons offered their services for free... The fast-food restaurant had already committed $30,000 to help pay Wilcher’s medical bills; a spokesman told the AP they would pay regardless of what the investigation into the incident found.

After it went viral, employees and managers at both Jackson locations
have faced death threats, have had drinks thrown at them through the
drive-thru window and have faced constant verbal harassment, the source
confirmed...

National and world media such as CNN, Nancy Grace, Huffington Post and
The Today Show jumped on the story, lambasting the employees, KFC and
YUM! Brands, KFC’s corporate owners...

23 June 2014

Anyone who has read this blog on a regular basis knows that I have repeatedly decried the sad situation facing Monarch butterflies in the United States. There's little I can do to alleviate the loss of their winter habitat in the mountain forests of Mexico or to stem the widespread use of Roundup herbicide, but perhaps with a series of blog posts I can inform the public about some of the nuances of growing milkweed - the Monarch's host plant (the only plant its caterpillars can feed on).

At our latitude (southern Wisconsin in the Upper Midwest), spikes of milkweed emerge in early May. These are growing from deep and well-established root systems that are well-protected from surface freezing temperatures in the winter. I presume the trigger for cell division is some threshhold temperature or some accumulation of degree-days. When that limit is reached, the growth is rapid. The top image shows asparagus-like spears that had not been present the day before.

With an deep-underground branching root system, the spikes can emerge in what appears to be totally inhospitable microenvironments. This one is coming through an old (probably deteriorated) piece of landscape fabric and past a layer of gravel. And the early growth is rapid:

This photo was taken one week after the first two. It's already 6" high and ready to accept Monarch eggs and tolerate the depradations of several caterpillars (Monarchs typically lay their eggs singly, but sometimes two oviposit on the same plant).

In the next installment I'll comment on the perception of the "weediness" of the plant.

She's worshipped by both Hindus and Buddhists in Nepal, who believe she's a reincarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga.

I got to know the mother of this Kumari - Nepal has a few of them - after several visits to her house. How did it feel when her daughter, Samita, was chosen to be a Kumari, I asked?

"I felt both happy and sad," she says. "On one
hand, I felt happy because when your daughter becomes god, having a god
in the home is a delightful thing. But I also got scared because I
wasn't sure if we would be able to follow all the rules."

There are many rules. For one, Samita's mother has to apply
special makeup to her daughter's face in intricate designs. The girl
isn't allowed to go outside except for festivals. On those occasions,
her feet must not touch the ground. That means someone has to carry the
young goddess...

I expect we'll do the interview in Nepali, but when I ask her a
question, she starts speaking fluently in English. She tells me that she
learned the language by reading newspapers during her Kumari days.

"When I was a goddess, I used to peek through the holes of windows," Chanira says. She's now a 19-year-old business student, and looks like any
ordinary teenager in her fashionable green T-shirt and black trousers.
She became a Kumari when she was just five years old...

This divine life ended abruptly when Chanira was 15, on the day she
first menstruated. Suddenly she was no longer the Kumari. She says the
transition was difficult. "When I had to step out of my house for the first time, I
didn't know how to walk properly," she says. "My mom and dad, they used
to hold my hands and teach me how to walk."

[The Oslo to Copenhagen] corridor is the most densely populated stretch of Scandinavia,
home to 8 million of the region's 20 million people. An ambitious plan
aims to link up its cities, medium-sized by global standards, across
three different countries to form a single megalopolis - '8 Million
City'.

The glue that will hold this megacity together? A high-speed train link
that should reduce rail travel time between Oslo and Copenhagen from 7.5
hours today to 2.5 hours by 2025.

More at Big Think, which notes that expansion with a side link to Stockholm would create a 12-million-person megalopolis. Personally, I would argue with the hypothesis that "next-level development is hampered by the demographic dispersal in small, relatively isolated urban centres," but obviously there's big money at stake here.

The image was posted at Reddit, and the discussion thread comments indicated that such establishments are rare in the United States, but not uncommon elsewhere.(note the sign should read "greater than or equal to." It's not just for 23-year-olds)

The word "microcephaly" comes from the Greek, "small head". But in
Pakistan, such children are known as chuas or "rat people". The name is
uncharitable but apt, for their sloping foreheads and narrow faces do,
indeed, have a rodent quality. When I visited the shrine earlier this
year, I found only one chua, a 30-year-old woman called Nazia. Mentally
disabled - I would judge her intelligence to be about that of a one- or
two-year-old child - her nominal function is to guard the shoes that
worshippers leave at its entrance, but that work seems to be mostly done
by her companion, a charming hypopituitary dwarf called Nazir...

These days, most chuas are intinerant beggars. Travelling up and down
the Grand Trunk Road, following a seasonal calender of religious
festivals. Each chua is owned, or perhaps leased, by a minder, often a
raffish, gypsy-like figure. The Chua-master looks after, and profits
from, his chua rather as a peasant might a donkey; together, they may
earn as much as 400 rupees per day, about £4...

There are several reasons for believing that microcephaly in the Punjab
is not caused by clamping. The first is simply that no one, or at least
no one I spoke to, seems to have actually seen it. The source of the
allegation always seems to be an untraceable relation in an unreachable
village. The second is that it is probably biologically impossible...

By the late 1990s, the disorder had been mapped to deficiencies in at least six different genes.

An architecture competition has been held and the winner chosen. The
striking design is for a brick building with a tall, square central
tower. Off the courtyard below will be the houses of worship for the
three faiths - the synagogue, the church and the mosque. It is to occupy
a prominent site - Petriplatz - in the heart of Berlin...

Can they get on? "We can. That there are people within each group who
can't is our problem but you have to start somewhere and that's what we
are doing."..

"Each of the singular spaces is designed according to the religious
needs, the particularities of each faith," he says. "There are for
instance two levels in the mosque and the synagogue but there's only one
level in the church. There will be an organ in the church. There are
places to wash feet in the mosque."

The percentage of Americans expressing a great deal or quite a lot of
confidence in Congress is the lowest for a trend that dates back to
1973. The high point for Congress, 42%, came in that year...

Democrats, independents, and Republicans are about equally likely to
express low confidence in Congress. This is a change from the past and
likely reflects the split control of Congress... Between 2009 and 2012, a period that saw Congress come under split
control, these partisan differences gradually diminished, and this year,
Democrats are a mere two percentage points more likely than Republicans
to report having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in Congress.

Americans' confidence in Congress is not only at its lowest point on
record, but also is the worst Gallup has ever found for any institution
it has measured since 1973.

...a merit-making ceremony traditionally practiced by ethnic Lao people throughout much of northeast Thailand and Laos, in numerous villages and municipalities near the beginning of the rainy season. Celebrations typically include preliminary music and dance performances, competitive processions of floats, dancers and musicians on the second day, and culminating on the third day in competitive firings of home-made rockets...

Coming immediately prior to the planting season, the festivals offer an excellent chance to make merry before the hard work begins; as well as enhancing communal prestige, and attracting and redistributing wealth as in any Gift culture...

19 June 2014

The account of the beheading of Holofernes by Judith is given in the deuterocanonical Book of Judith, and is the subject of more than 114 paintings and sculptures. In the story, Judith, a beautiful widow, is able to enter the tent of Holofernes because of his desire for her. Holofernes was an Assyrian general who was about to destroy Judith's home, the city of Bethulia, though the story is emphatic that no "defilement" takes place. Overcome with drink, he passes out and is decapitated by Judith; his head is taken away in a basket (often depicted as carried by an elderly female servant).

Early Renaissance images of Judith tend to depict her as fully dressed and desexualized; besides Donatello's sculpture, this is the Judith seen in Sandro Botticelli's The Return of Judith to Bethulia (1470-1472), Andrea Mantegna's Judith and Holofernes (1495, with a detached head), and in the corner of Michelangelo's Sistine chapel (1508-1512). Later Renaissance artists, notably Lucas Cranach the Elder, who with his workshop painted at least eight Judiths, showed a more sexualized Judith, a "seducer-assassin"...

Judith remained popular in the Baroque period, but around 1600 images of Judith began to take on a more violent character, "and Judith became a threatening character to artist and viewer [the top embed is a Caravaggio]...

Modern paintings of the scene often cast Judith nude, as was signalled already by Klimt. Franz Stuck's 1928 Judith[right] has "the deliverer of her people" standing naked and holding a sword besides the couch on which Holofernes, half-covered by blue sheets—where the text portrays her as god-fearing and chaste, "Franz von Stuck's Judith becomes, in dazzling nudity, the epitome of depraved seduction".

As reported in an op-ed "Women's Life" Telegraph article about "spornosexuals":

If you thought the mankini was bad, the penchant for men revealing way more
than they need to on the beach has now reached a whole new level. The
half-thong mankini hybrid... If this is what some men think makes them look sexy,
then we're all doomed...

Twenty years ago, Mark Simpson coined the term 'metrosexual'. Now, a new, more
extreme, sex- and body-obsessed version of men exists, he says - and they're
called spornosexuals. The term encapsulates the new breed of male who thinks nothing of using (and
abusing) products, practises and pleasures previously only the domain of
women and gay men. Practises including wearing half-thongs to the beach.

One might argue that the paper-based version of the classic "Battleship" game has been rendered obsolete by electronic versions, but this archaic technology could come in handy on long camping trips and other special situations.

But that's only marginally relevant; I'm posting this to introduce a useful website. Printable Paper has an extensive set of free-to-print paper products - particularly graph papers (I remember once searching fruitlessly for basic log-linear graph paper). Dozens of different graphing formats are available at the link, along with music paper, quilting and cross-stitch papers, sports score sheets, and even blank templates for comics.

A tiny tree frog seems to be using city drains to amplify its serenades to attract females. In research published today in the Journal of Zoology, researchers found that the Mientien tree frog native to Taiwan congregates in roadside storm drains during the mating season.

Audio
recordings revealed that the mating songs of the frogs inside the
structures were louder and longer than those of their less-streetwise
rivals, who gathered in patches of land next to the drains.

“This
is perhaps the first study to show that an animal preferentially uses
human-made structures to potentially enhance the sounds of its vocal
communication signals,” says Mark Bee, a biologist at the University of
Minnesota, Twin Cities, in St Paul. “These males could be taking
advantage of the enhanced acoustics in drainage ditches to outdo their
competition.”

From Nature, where there is an appropriate disclaimer in the closing sentence.

15 June 2014

It's not time to make a change,
Just relax, take it easy -
You're still young, that's your fault,
There's so much you have to know.
Find a girl, settle down, if you want you can marry.
Look at me, I am old but I'm happy.

I was once like you are now,
And I know that it's not easy
To be calm when you've found
Something going on.
But take your time, think a lot, think of everything you've got,
For you will still be here tomorrow but you dreams may not.

How can I try to explain,

Because when I do he turns away again;
It's always been the same, same old story.
From the moment I could talk, I was ordered to listen -
Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away
I know, I have to go.

It's not time to make a change,
Just sit down, take it slowly
You're still young, that's your fault,
There's so much you have to go through.
Find a girl, settle down, if you want you can marry
Look at me, I am old but I'm happy.

All the times that I've cried,

Keeping all the things I knew inside -
It's hard, but it's harder to ignore it.
If they were right I'd agree, but it's them they know, not me -
Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away.

11 June 2014

10 June 2014

The phrase "going Dutch" conventionally refers to the sharing of expenses, but today I'm using it to note that all of the posts (and several reposts) will contain material about or from the Netherlands.

Over the years I've been blogging, the Dutch have been among the most faithful readers and commenters (the map shows their locations), and I regularly follow several blogs authored by readers here.

I know of at least one compilation of Dutch blogs, but I'd be more interested in discovering additional blogs written by readers of TYWKIWDBI. If you are a Dutch blogger (in the Netherlands or as an expat blogging Dutch material), please leave your blog's address in the Comments for this post.

When my father was growing up in a small Pennsylvania railroad town in the early 1900s, his nickname was "Dutch," not because of any Netherlands connection, but because the family was "Deutsch" (German).

Telescopes (and microscopes) were invented in the Netherlands. Recently the oldest one ever was discovered during the construction of a subway in Delft.

The Dutch telescope was invented in 1608 in Middelburg. Shortly after
that, Delft became a well-known producer of lens viewers, according to
historians. Engravings from that time period reveal similar viewing
apparatuses, but up to now, none were believed to have survived in the
Netherlands. Worldwide, only 20 are known to exist. The oldest kept
scopes in the Netherlands are only from the second half of the 17th
century, among others from the Christiaan Huygens collection...

Because tin corrodes so easily, none of the earlier ones were known to
have survived. This one was found in an old canal where the low oxygen
environment kept it from rusting into nothingness. There’s even a very
slim chance that it’s the oldest telescope in the world, but it’s highly
unlikely. There’s only a tiny window of possibility since Galileo started making his in 1609, the year after the first patents applications were filed in the Netherlands and the Museo Galileo in Florence has two of his from 1609-1610.

Utrecht-based architectural practice, BK. Architecten, have designed the Waanders In de Broeren
project. Completed in 2013, the 15th-century cathedral has been
converted into a modern book store and can be found in Zwolle, The
Netherlands.

This radical concept in
a 15th-century Broerenkerk cathedral spans over three floors and
includes a shop in the former church building. The architect radically changed the interior design
of the 547-year-old Gothic building, but had to ensure they left the
original features, such as the pipe organ, stained glass windows and
decor intact.

A rather bleak painting ascribed to Jan de Baen, depicting a famous historical event in Dutch history (full title: The corpses of the de Witt brothers, Jan and Cornelis, hanging on the Groene Zoodje on the Vijverberg).

The figure in the lower right corner is apparently shining light on the nighttime scene to illuminate it for the artist.

Addendum: MJ Valente found the following information at the website of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam:

"De Witt held a key position in Dutch politics, being a kind of Prime
Minister avant la lettre. In that role, he was repeatedly in conflict
with the Orange faction, led by Prince William III of Orange (later King
of England during the so-called Glorious Revolution), who felt menaced
in his authority. When De Witt came to power, a collective aversion to
monarchical power dominated among the Dutch people. But things changed
in 1672, the ‘Disaster Year’, when the Dutch Republic was attacked by a
large alliance of hostile countries. Popular feeling suddenly turned in
favor of William III, and mistrust grew against Johann de Witt and his
brother Cornelis.

The latter, who was also an influential political
figure, got imprisoned in The Hague on false accusations of treason. On
20 August 1672, when Johan was visiting his brother in prison, the
brothers were dragged out of the building and lynched outside by an
angry mob. The rage seemed to be spontaneous, but was in fact
well-organized and planned by Orangist militiamen. The frenzy was so
immense that the De Witts were not just killed, but literally ripped
apart by the inflamed mass. Body parts like heart and fingers were
removed to be exposed as souvenirs, while other parts were roasted and
eaten(!) by the hysterical crowd, in a bizarre outburst of cannibalism.
Their corpses were eventually hung upside down on a scaffold nearby. The
disgusting sight was captured in this dark painting, whose artist
(attributed to Jan de Baen) seems to have witnessed the lynching and
presents us his gruesome experience in this early form of visual
journalism."

And Rob from Amersfoort adds the following:

1672 was indeed called the Year of Disaster, when The Netherlands where attacked by England, France ànd Germany.

The
scaffold was located near the prison where Johan's brother was held
(the Gevangenpoort, a building with a city gate, it still exists). On
the other side of the road the Dutch center of government (the
Binnenhof) is located (with the parliament and the office of the PM).

I
wrote a essay about Johan de Witt when I was in high school. Watching
this scene always makes me feel sad, he was a good man. This is an
example of what happens when people are stirred up by populists.
Remarkable is that in 2002 the same thing happened at the same location
after a famous politician was shot; a crowd of angry people gathered
near the Binnenhof, ready to lynch the first politician they would see
...

NB the head of the first Dutch PM, a man born in Amersfoort,
was chopped of inside the Binnenhof, after he was falsely accused by the
ruling prince of Orange. The latter was the grand-uncle of prince
Willem III who stirred up the lynch mob in 1672. Later Willem III became
king of England, so for him it worked out fine.

The main part of refugees to England, Wales and Scotland from the 11th till the 17th century were from the Low Countries... In the Dutch Golden Age, spanning most of the 17th century, Dutch trade, science, military, and art
were among the most acclaimed in the world, and many English words of
Dutch origin concerning these areas are stemming from this period...English and Dutch rivalry at sea resulted in many Dutch naval terms in English... Via settlements in North America and elsewhere in the world Dutch
language influenced English spoken there, particularly American English.

It's not as automated as might appear from the still photo. As a video demonstrates, humans have to be present to load the bricks in the proper order and position. But it does allow them to do their work from a standing position, and presumably more quickly.Via Reddit.

"It's not quite the Holy Grail of fingerprinting, but it's a very
important discovery," Marcel de Puit, fingerprint researcher at the
Dutch Forensic Institute (NFI), told AFP on Wednesday, hailing what he
said was a world's first... "Being able to date the prints means you can determine when a potential
suspect was at the crime scene or which fingerprints are relevant for
the investigation," De Puit said...

"The chemicals in these fingerprints can be analysed," said De Puit.
"Some disappear over time and it's the relative proportions of these
chemicals that allow us to date a fingerprint."

08 June 2014

Before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s,
when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned
bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock 'n' roll on exposed X-ray film
salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives...

"They would cut the X-ray into a
crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole,"
says author Anya von Bremzen. "You'd have Elvis on the lungs, Duke
Ellington on Aunt Masha's brain scan — forbidden Western music captured
on the interiors of Soviet citizens."

Chicago artist Leonard Volk produced... the casts of Lincoln’s hands on May 20,
two days after the Republican Party nominated him for the presidency.
Lincoln’s right hand was still swollen from shaking hands with
supporters. To steady his hand in the mold, Lincoln went out to the
woodshed and cut off a piece of broom handle. Volk later placed the
piece of handle in the cast displayed here.

Most readers will already be familiar with the Navajo code talkers who served vital roles during the second World War. I, for one, however, didn't realize that code talking was first made use of during the Great War.

In the autumn of 1918, US troops were involved in the Meuse-Argonne
Offensive on the Western Front. It was one of the largest frontline
commitments of American soldiers in WW1, but communications in the field
were compromised. The Germans had successfully tapped telephone lines,
were deciphering codes and repeatedly capturing runners sent out to
deliver messages directly...

The solution was stumbled upon by chance, an overheard conversation
between two Choctaw soldiers in the 142nd Infantry Regiment. The pair
were chatting in camp when a captain walked by and asked what language
they were speaking...

"Using the Choctaw language had huge advantages," says Dr William
Meadows of Missouri State University, the only academic to have studied
and written extensively on the Choctaw code talkers. "It was a largely
unknown language. Only a few American Indian tribes had more than 20,000
people so their languages weren't widely spoken and most weren't
written down...

Even if the Germans were listening, they couldn't understand. It was
also the quickest way of coding and decoding information, faster than
any machine, giving US troops a crucial edge over the enemy... It is believed none of the languages or codes used have ever been broken by an enemy.

But at the same time,the Choctaw language was under pressure back in the
US. It was a time of cultural assimilation. Government attempts to
"civilise" American Indians involved putting their children in state-run
boarding schools, where they were often severely punished for speaking
in their native tongue.

After several decades of surfing the web it has become progressively more difficult to be shocked by reports of unusual behavior. But every now and then one encounters an example of human stupidity so egregious, so far below two standard deviations of normal intellectual activity, that one can't help but wonder at the complexities of human psychology. To wit...

Riggs said her 10-year-old daughter went on a school field trip recently
and came back sun-burned. Riggs said district policy didn’t allow her
daughter to bring sunscreen to reapply... Riggs said skin cancer runs in her family and her father recently passed away from it.

But, North East Independent School District spokeswoman Aubrey
Chancellor said sunscreen is considered a medication, something children
need a doctor’s note to have at school.

“We have to look at the safety of all of our students and we can’t
allow children to share sunscreen,” she said. “They could possibly have
an allergic reaction (or) they could ingest it. It’s really a dangerous
situation.”

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Readers - especially old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, and long-lost relatives - are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net